After years of struggling for success, Bert Williams made the radical decision to don blackface makeup and play the "coon." Behind this mask he became a Broadway headliner as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields, who called him "the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew." This brilliantly written novel is unblinking in its attention to the sinister compromises that make up an identity.
